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Monday, July 14, 2014

When a Young Pat Buchanan Met Nixon: "You're Not as Conservative as Bill Buckley, Are You?"

A conservative since I can remember, I had been a backer of Barry
Goldwater from the day Richard Nixon conceded in 1960. Arriving at the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat from Columbia Journalism School in June 1962, I
had maneuvered myself onto the editorial page by August. The
Globe-Democrat had backed Goldwater for the nomination, but when he went
down to defeat, I wrote a 2,000-word essay: “What Is the Future for
Conservatism?”

“Was the Goldwater candidacy the high-water mark of a conservative
tide which will now ebb back into the footnotes of history?” I asked.
After detailing the mistakes of the candidate and campaign, perhaps too
harshly, I answered, “No, no matter that the scribes of the left are now
publishing their meticulously prepared elegies over conservatism, the
movement was not repudiated and is by no means dead. It was Mr.
Goldwater who was repudiated and may well be politically dead.” At the
essay’s end, I ventured a prediction that has stood the test of time.

[T]he new conservatism antedated Goldwater, made him a
national figure to rival Presidents, and will post-date him. For that
conservatism depends primarily for its momentum upon one fact: The
abject failure of the ideology of Western liberalism to either halt or
reverse the advance of totalitarian Communism. As there is no sign today
liberalism has learned how to check that advance, there is no sign the
conservative movement will wither and die. It has lost a battle, not the
war.

In early December 1965, I learned that Nixon would be speaking at a
Republican gathering in Belleville, Illinois, across the river from St.
Louis, filling in for an ailing Everett Dirksen. And Globe- Democrat
cartoonist Don Hesse, a good friend, would be hosting the reception
following. I wanted to meet Nixon to see if I might get aboard his 1968
campaign early, a campaign I saw as inevitable. I was certain he was
going to run, that his only serious rival was Romney, and that an
alignment of the conservative movement with the Nixon Republicans could
ensure his nomination.

After
three years of writing editorials, I was losing my enthusiasm. Although
I was perhaps in line to be editorial editor before my thirtieth
birthday, the prospect of a life in St. Louis, writing editorials, no
longer held the attraction it once did. “It is required of a man that he
should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being
judged not to have lived,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes. I believed that
then, and I had a card to play with Nixon.

Ten years before, I had been sitting on the caddie log at the
all-male Burning Tree Club where Eisenhower golfed, when the plaid golf
bag of the vice president was brought out, and the pro stared over at me
and my friend Pete Cook, the only white caddies. The veteran caddies
had taken out their afternoon bags. So it was that I spent four hours
with Vice President Nixon. My memories of that day sixty years ago
endure. In his early forties, Nixon, of medium height and build, was not
a natural athlete. His swing was stiff and jerky. His drives were
grounders, pop flies, an occasional single. I spent time avoiding the
poison ivy finding his ball. But something else was obvious. Nixon was
happy out there with the guys at that all-male club. He was enjoying
himself hugely. Seeing a familiar figure across a fairway, Nixon
shouted, “Hey, Stu, what are you doing out here? There’s a vote up on
the Hill!” “Tell ’em to shove it up their pratt!” hollered back Senator
Stu Symington of Missouri.

Nixon laughed heartily and played on.

In Hesse’s kitchen, I brought up with Nixon our previous encounter,
mentioned the plaid bag and the names of the pro at Burning Tree, Max
Elbin, and the assistant pro, Don Sailer, to convince Nixon I was not
making this up. “If you’re going to run in ’68,” I said, “I’d like to
get aboard early.”

Unimpressed by my title of assistant editorial editor, Nixon wanted
to know what I wrote. As there were only two writers on the editorial
page at the Globe-Democrat, other than the editor, I told him I wrote on
all issues, foreign and domestic, three or four editorials a day. As
for my getting aboard early, Nixon said, 1968 would hinge on how the
party did in recouping its losses in 1964, and that was where his
energies would be directed, on the campaign a year off, in 1966.

The next morning, on the long drive from Belleville to the St. Louis
airport, Nixon had questioned Hesse intently about me. My hopes dimmed
when I heard nothing for days. Then came a call from New York. Could I,
said the familiar voice, fly to New York to talk further? I told the
former vice president he should probably ask my publisher. Richard H.
Amberg was soon in my office, stunned he had just received a call from
Richard Nixon asking permission for me to come visit him. Of course you
can go, he said.

That meeting with Nixon after I had waited for hours in the office of
his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, made an impression. I had just turned
twenty-seven. Nixon was fifty-three, younger than Rockefeller, Romney,
or Reagan, though he had been a national figure since I was ten. None of
his rivals had a career that remotely matched his. He moved from
subject to subject swiftly and pressed me on everything from the war to
the conservative movement to civil rights. He was an exhausting
interviewer. When Rose interrupted to say Delaware senator John Williams
was on the line, I got up to step out of his office. Nixon waved for me
to stay and went on to advise Williams on strategy for the tax
legislation in Congress.

After three hours, Nixon returned to the issue that seemed most on his mind—ideology:

“You’re not as conservative as Bill Buckley, are you?” he pressed.

I had written a Globe-Democrat endorsement of Buckley for mayor of
New York, but felt a noncommittal answer might be best: “I have great
respect for Bill Buckley.” At meeting’s end Nixon said he wanted to hire
me—for one year. The pay would be $13,500—a rate of $12,000 for the
first six months and $15,000 the last six. This was half again the
$9,000 I was making at the Globe-Democrat, where I had reached the top
five-year Guild scale in three. My assignments would be to handle his
growing volume of mail, help produce a monthly column he had agreed to
write for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and assist him in the
off-year elections in 1966.

I accepted, but told him he should call the publisher. Nixon did. I was aboard.

By Christmas I was headed for New York. From January 1966 until that
August morning in 1974 when Marine One lifted off the White House lawn
for Andrews, to carry Nixon to his last trip aboard Air Force One as
President, I was with him.

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